Write a story loosely related to legend of narcissus. Include vivid descriptions of characters and describe each scene in detail

What the Water Kept

When Mara returned to Bellwether, she brought seven trunks, a silver medal, and a portrait of herself that no one in the village thought particularly accurate.

The portrait showed a woman with a long white throat and a gaze as remote as winter sunlight. The real Mara had a small scar through one eyebrow, ink beneath her fingernails, and a habit of biting the inside of her cheek when she was angry. She was beautiful in both versions, but differently. In the painting, nothing had ever happened to her.

Her younger sister met her at the harbor.

Tess stood among the coils of wet rope, wearing their father’s old coat. She had broad shoulders, a crooked nose, and dark hair cut bluntly beneath her ears. A fish scale glittered on her wrist.

“You’ve got thin,” she said.

“You’ve got Father’s manners.”

“He left those to me. You got the good cheekbones.”

Mara laughed, and for a moment they embraced without remembering that they had spent eleven years becoming strangers.

Behind them, sailors unloaded crates of green oranges. The harbor smelled of diesel, salt, and split herring. Above the quay, Bellwether climbed its hill in narrow terraces, the houses pressed shoulder to shoulder against the wind. Their mother’s house stood at the top, its blue shutters faded almost white.

Their mother had been dead for nine days.

Inside the house, everything seemed to have been interrupted rather than finished.

A cup stood beside the kitchen sink. A gray cardigan hung over a chair, its elbows rounded by years of use. On the windowsill, three onions had put out pale green shoots.

Tess had cleaned the rooms, but she had not moved these things.

“I couldn’t decide what counted as clearing up,” she said, “and what counted as throwing her away.”

Mara set down her gloves.

The kitchen window looked over the roofs toward the sea. As a girl she had drawn there for hours while her mother gutted fish at the table, working a knife beneath silver bellies. Even now, beneath the smell of soap, Mara imagined she could detect that sharp, cold scent.

On the mantel stood a clay woman she had made at fourteen. Its head was too large. One arm had broken off before it was fired.

“She kept that?”

“She kept everything.”

“In a drawer, I hope.”

“Mostly on the mantel.”

Mara lifted the figure. Her thumb settled into a hollow she had pressed into its back decades ago.

From the doorway, Tess said, “She was proud of you.”

Mara studied the clumsy face.

Outside, wind drove a handful of rain against the window.

The northern headland was where Mara went when the house grew unbearable.

She followed a sheep path through gorse and salt-flattened grass. Black cliffs stood above the water in broken columns, and gulls wheeled below her, their cries strangely small in the great open air.

Near the ruined watchtower lay a pool she did not remember.

It was oval, perhaps six feet across, sheltered by a shelf of dark stone. No stream entered it. No weed floated on its surface. Although the wind combed the grass flat, the water remained perfectly still.

Mara knelt.

At first she saw only the sky, pale and immense. Then her face appeared.

She was not younger in the pool. The little lines beside her eyes remained; so did the scar in her eyebrow. Yet the woman beneath the water possessed a serenity Mara had never seen in any mirror.

Her mouth was relaxed. Her eyes held neither suspicion nor the quick, measuring attention that came over Mara whenever anyone looked at her.

Mara leaned closer.

The woman did too.

A gull shrieked overhead. Mara glanced up, irritated by the interruption. When she looked down again, the reflection was waiting.

“You look rested,” she whispered.

The reflected lips moved.

Mara stayed until the cold had passed through her skirt and numbed her knees.

That evening Tess made fish stew.

Steam clouded the kitchen windows. Saffron stained the broth gold, and rough pieces of bread soaked in bowls their father had brought home from a wrecked merchant ship. Tess ate with her sleeves rolled up, exposing a purple bruise on one forearm.

“What happened there?” Mara asked.

“Winch handle.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Only when people ask.”

Mara smiled into her spoon.

For a while they spoke of practical things: a leaking roof, a buyer for their mother’s boat, whether the pear tree should be cut back.

Then Mara said, “Do you remember a pool by the old watchtower?”

Tess stopped tearing her bread.

“Above the north steps?”

“Yes.”

“Gran called it the Widow’s Glass.”

“Why?”

“She had names for everything. She called the pantry draft the Hungry Gentleman.”

“But why the Widow’s Glass?”

Tess rubbed a crumb between finger and thumb.

“People used to go there to see someone they’d lost.”

Mara looked toward the dark window.

“And did they?”

“Gran said they saw enough to keep going back.”

Mara returned the next morning with a sketchbook.

The sky was low and white. Far below, waves broke against the cliff, opening green hollows before collapsing into foam. She laid a folded coat on the stone and settled beside the pool.

Her reflection looked pleased to see her.

Mara began to draw.

For years she had made portraits for wealthy people who wanted their faces corrected without being changed. She knew how to soften a jaw, warm a cheek, suggest intelligence in an empty gaze. Her patrons praised her honesty and paid extra to remove evidence of age.

Now her hand faltered.

Whenever she captured the curve of the mouth, the eyes went wrong. When the eyes seemed right, the whole face became merely attractive.

She tore out a page.

The woman in the pool watched without disappointment.

That was the thing Mara could not draw.

By noon, scraps of paper lay around her like pale leaves. Her fingers were stiff, her stomach empty. Still she remained.

At last she set the pencil down.

“I don’t know how you do it,” she said.

The reflection’s lips shaped the words, but its expression did not alter.

Mara felt, absurdly, forgiven.

Over the following weeks, the weather softened.

Yellow gorse opened along the headland, smelling faintly of coconut in the sun. Fishing boats returned with bright heaps of mackerel. Children appeared in the streets with bare legs and scabbed knees.

Mara saw little of it.

She rose before Tess and walked north carrying a blanket and a flask of tea. Later she stopped taking the tea; it grew cold untouched. She bought a cushion for the stone, then hid it in a crevice so she would not have to carry it.

The reflected woman changed by small degrees.

Once, while Mara complained about a patron who had refused to pay her, the woman’s mouth remained closed for a moment after Mara’s had opened.

Mara went silent.

The woman smiled.

It should have frightened her. Instead she began to cry.

She cried awkwardly, with her nose running and one hand pressed against her mouth. Beneath the surface, the other Mara watched with such patient attention that Mara leaned toward her as she might once have leaned into her mother’s lap.

After that, she spoke freely.

She told the pool about the parties at which she had laughed too loudly. About letters she had answered months late, then stopped answering altogether. About her mother’s last letter, which had remained unopened on her desk for twelve days.

“I thought she wanted me to come home,” she said.

The water held her face.

“She did want me to come home.”

A cloud passed over the sun. The cliffs darkened; the sea turned the color of pewter.

Mara waited until the light returned before she left.

Tess found the sketches beneath Mara’s bed.

There were dozens: the same face, abandoned at different stages. Some pages had been rubbed almost through. On one, Mara had drawn only the eyes.

That evening, Tess put them on the kitchen table.

Mara stood in the doorway, still wearing her outdoor coat. Salt had dried white along its hem.

“You went through my room?”

“I was looking for blankets.”

“You could have asked.”

“I have asked. You’re never here.”

Tess had set two bowls out for supper. One was already empty. A skin had formed across the other.

“You’ve been at that pool every day,” she said.

“I’m working.”

“On these?”

Mara gathered the drawings too quickly, bending a corner.

Tess watched her smooth it.

“Come out with me tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll take the boat around the southern point. There are seals on the rocks.”

“I can’t.”

“Then help me mend the kitchen shutter.”

“I said I can’t.”

Tess’s face tightened. In the lamplight, she suddenly resembled their mother—not the mother Mara remembered from childhood, but the older woman in the photograph Tess had placed beside the clock.

Mara looked away.

“Who do you see there?” Tess asked.

“No one.”

“Mara.”

“Myself.”

Tess sat down slowly.

For a while the only sound was the spoon settling against the side of her bowl.

At last she said, “You’re here already.”

Mara held the drawings against her chest.

“It doesn’t feel like it.”

The storm came three nights later.

All afternoon, the harbor had emptied of boats. Men hauled nets into sheds and lashed doors shut. By dusk, rain streamed sideways through the village, and the wind made a low, continuous sound beneath the eaves.

Mara stood at her bedroom window.

Beyond the wavering glass, the headland was invisible.

She tried to imagine rain striking the pool, destroying its smooth surface. She pictured her reflection waiting beneath the broken water.

Downstairs, Tess was fastening the kitchen shutter.

Mara put on her coat.

She left by the back door, carefully lifting the latch so it would not click.

The path had become a runnel of mud.

Twice Mara slipped to her knees. Gorse tore her stocking. The wind caught her coat and pulled it wide, forcing her to crouch until the gust passed.

At the watchtower, she could barely see.

Rain ran into her eyes. The ruined walls loomed and vanished through sheets of water. Below the cliff, the sea struck with a force she felt through the soles of her boots.

But the pool was still.

Mara dropped beside it.

The woman beneath the surface looked up from clear, quiet water. Her hair was dry. There was warmth in her face, and behind her, where the sky should have been, Mara saw a soft yellow light.

She recognized the kitchen as it had been when she was a child.

Someone was moving beyond the reflected doorway.

Mara bent closer.

“Mum?”

A hand appeared beneath the water.

Not a perfect hand. A working hand, thickened at the knuckles, with a small burn near the thumb.

Mara reached.

The water was so cold that her arm seized. She gasped, losing her balance, and caught the edge of the pool with her other hand.

Then a voice called her name.

Tess stood beside the ruined tower, bent against the wind. She had no hat. Her hair clung to her cheeks, and she carried the harbor lantern, its flame jolting behind cloudy glass.

“Get back from there!”

Mara turned toward the pool.

The hand waited.

Tess came stumbling across the rock. She set down the lantern and seized Mara’s coat at the shoulder.

For an instant Mara fought her.

Later, this was what she remembered most clearly: the fury with which she tried to wrench herself free, and Tess’s face as she understood it.

Then the stone beneath Mara’s hand broke.

Both women fell sideways. Tess struck the rock hard enough to lose her breath. Mara’s arm came out of the pool, wet to the shoulder.

The surface shattered.

Rain beat into ordinary water.

Spring arrived late that year.

Mara stayed.

There were mornings when she woke with an ache so precise that she put on her boots before remembering. On those mornings, she sat at the kitchen table until Tess came downstairs.

They did not always talk.

Sometimes Tess laid a hand on her shoulder as she passed. Sometimes she was cross, or tired, or too occupied with the price of fuel to notice Mara’s silence.

Mara began drawing her.

The first portrait caught Tess with her head bent over a torn net, a strand of hair stuck to her lip. Her hands looked large. Her broken nose cast an uneven shadow.

When Tess saw it, she frowned.

“Is that really what I look like?”

“Just then.”

Tess considered this.

“You’ve got the hands right.”

Above the north cliffs, a clump of white flowers grew beside the pool. Six narrow petals surrounded each small golden cup. Their stems bowed toward the water.

Mara saw them once, from the path.

She stood long enough to watch them tremble in the breeze. Then she turned homeward, carrying bread beneath her arm, while behind her the flowers nodded over their reflections.